


fall over

by meatmarket



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Canon Compliant, M/M, Mutual Roastage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:41:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28529367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: “Careful where you walk,” Minho suggests. “Research shows most accidents in your life happen to you at home.”
Relationships: Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 8
Kudos: 44





	fall over

**Author's Note:**

> so it goes fellas

A hair catches over Hyunjin’s eye, white through his eyelashes. 

“Now,” Minho begins, and Hyunjin’s on the move already, twirling like a silverfish on their bathroom floor at midnight.

“Don’t move,” Minho, getting the urge of altruism, says. “I said—stop fussing—”

Minho bear-traps a weaseling Hyunjin in his arms and chokes him out well.

**

Hyunjin undulates like a plastic bag with bones in the mirror. 

Weaving on the beat, he skips over its knots a little funny, circling Minho backwards. His body slopes into it like he trusts it to hold him. He shakes out his wet dog hair. 

Ribs pinched in, Minho drags over space like wading through heady quicksand. It looks effortless enough. It looks uniform enough.

Minho pouts his lips into an off-putting kiss. Hyunjin shimmies away just in time. He deflates to the ground like the limp vessel he is.

Minho stands over him. “Hello.”

“I’m really paralyzed,” Hyunjin croaks. “Don’t come any closer.”

“What’s with your face? All red. You look like spicy leftovers.”

Hyunjin kicks him in the ankle. 

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

Hyunjin kicks him again. 

“Ah,” Minho says. “I see.”

“What?”

Minho doesn’t say.

“What?” Hyunjin planks onto his side.

Minho watches the loose ass of his sweats in the mirror and deliberates. 

He can see Felix’s new shoes chucked next to the wall. The black outcrop along the wall has two downed water bottles with what Minho’s pretty sure is Hyunjin’s DNA on them. 

Minho rakes his hair back. The music stops, holds, and dips into something Chan would fuck to.

“What?” Hyunjin zeroes in on Minho’s twitchy mouth.

“You look like a badly-drawn webtoon character.”

“One day, your body will disappear under mysterious circumstances. One day…”

Minho smiles.

“You hate me,” Hyunjin says.

“Not true,” Minho grovels, just a little melodramatic. Mirror convos are easy like that. “It’s great when you,” he motions like when getting tased, “with your hands, on the beat.”

Hyunjin produces high-quality unimpressed content that’s not even close to believable.

Minho encourages, “Please continue being a baby.”

That is, slow, back-bound, and a little illiterate.

The compressed shakes from hours of dancing unzip all at once down his legs, and he just wants to take them off for a little.

“Baby, baby, baby,” he coos, sliding closer on his knees.

Hyunjin’s frown comes down over his eyes. Aw, his face. He wants Minho dead.

Because he can, Minho touches the monster vein in the waterslide sweat along Hyunjin’s forearm. This turns out to be instant Hyunjin repellent, because he mumbles, “Forgot the AC,” and springs back up.

It’s not easy, never missing, but look at Minho.

**

First time he sees Hyunjin jacking off through the shower stall, he’s more surprised than Hyunjin is when he comes.

Minho just wanted a modest 3.00-A.M. piss. 

His eyes are peeled so far back they water in the door draft. The shower is hissing and the light is so low he’s developing an eye condition. He’s incredibly ungrateful for this opportunity, Hyunjin.

**

It’s all he thinks about for the longest week of his life. The image of Hyunjin’s very busy arm, how his pitch went comical when he did something nice by what Minho deems sheer accident. Minho almost burst out laughing right then.

Instead, he weighed the pros and cons of barging in anyway to a) TAKE THE PISS ALREADY and b) let Hyunjin know nobody with self-respect jacked it like that. If nothing else, he deserved to know. 

But Hyunjin pressed his palm to his mouth with a pressure way past what estheticians told them not to use, ever. You don’t want your lips to explode like a storage of pus.

Thinking back on it leaves him with the sticky brain and tense mouth in the pouch black of their room. He blinks in the general curtained direction of Hyunjin’s sleep shuffling. By the rhythm of his breathing, Hyunjin must be at least quarter-awake.

Minho didn’t even think he liked Hyunjin that much. Certainly not enough to get a contextually-disturbing eyeful of his lily-white ass and not tell it it was in his way.

**

In the mirror, Hyunjin looks at himself for too long.

For breakfast Minho drank eight egg whites, like athletes do. They now make his stomach slip on its oiliness as they giggle inside him, and he’s still thinking about it.

Week two.

Minho sometimes feels the odd one out, the adlib of the song. (Note to self: this is a perfect angsty lyric.) It’s only right that he’s spectating comfortably to Hyunjin killing himself at the soaked tail-end of practice which he imposed on himself. 

“You keep doing that, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

In the resting count, Hyunjin mumbles, “I’m careful.”

“What? No. You should do it from your core.”

“What?” Hyunjin mocks. “Do it from your mouth, hyung.”

“Do what?”

“Be quiet,” Hyunjin says sweetly. Knowing Minho is stock-still human waste at this hour, his smile jackknifes.

That’s okay. Tomorrow is waiting.

**

First time Hyunjin leans in too close after jizzing all over the shower tiles that time, there’s a decision to be made here because it looks like he’s going in for a kiss and Minho’s heart is doing laps for fear of having to punch his lights out and then deal with the company fallout.

Right? From this angle, it really does look like that. 

Minho’s knuckles fist white and stringy at the same time his mouth puckers for impact.

“What are you doing?” asks Hyunjin quite curiously. He watches Minho’s clench.

Well, maybe the angle was lying then.

“Breath check,” Minho says. “You, Hwang?”

Hyunjin looks around but finds no help, no explanation, let alone immediate exits.

“Careful where you walk,” Minho suggests. “Research shows most accidents in your life happen to you at home.”

He leaves Hyunjin to ponder that.

**

Week three finds him cured.

“Pick a different one, please,” Hyunjin says. 

“Why?”

“It doesn’t go well.”

“I’ll keep it then,” Minho says, tightening the belt Hyunjin thinks will bring on the apocalypse, tucking the shirt in he hasn’t commented on. It feels like a cold sheet of aluminum. They match just fine. He doesn’t see why they should—the point of a studio shoot is for people to be able to tell them apart. 

Sidewise, Hyunjin tracks the silhouette Minho cuts, starting from his thighs, and implies something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

“What did you say?” Minho asks lightly.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Three seconds later, Hyunjin mumbles something that flirts very intentionally with demise.

“Exacerbates my height problem?” Minho repeats, inviting.

“No problem. Maybe if you got insoles,” so close they could touch, Hyunjin cranes his neck like it’s demonstrating the difference. “You need, like, ten more centimeters, right? Wait, but aren’t you already…” He sizes Minho up like there’s a camera to which he’s hinting Minho’s been in the business of relying on height boosters in plain sight. 

Minho takes a languid step forward. Their knees knock.

“Minho-hyung, kidding,” Hyunjin says blandly, hands raising. “Handsomest hyung—”

“You know what happens now.”

Hyunjin starts power-walking away. “You grow?” 

“Hyung will hug you for a long time.”

**

“For the masses,” Hyunjin reasons. 

Minho knows he’s lying. The only thing he doesn’t know is why Hyunjin is so obsessed with him. 

“They’re asking for one? Our angelic, faceless fans?”

Hyunjin makes a noise so noncommittal Minho’s ancient genetic instinct to hunt activates.

“A picture of us?” Minho presses.

No warning, no nothing, Hyunjin’s arm extends like a diseased selfie stick, angling to implicate Minho’s face in the same frame as him. 

And wouldn’t that be something.

“They love your edited personality,” Minho praises.

When Hyunjin has obsessed his fill, it’s time to see how the photoshoot turned out, of course. He doesn’t seem to like it when he finds Minho’s right and left middle fingers respectively had joined the parade at full mast, rendering them all unusable.

“Let’s take more in the future,” Minho smiles.

**

Hyunjin stands by Minho’s bed. This is what happens after two declined calls, the ceiling of benefit of the doubt that Minho is willing to overlook. Maybe one more, he doesn’t feel like moving. 

He can’t hear Hyunjin through his AirPods. Very good insulation.

The praying mantis promenading on his screen has the Hyunjin flair, down to the proportions and how green he sometimes gets. Minho can’t say he’s glad for this manifestation. 

He unplugs his left ear.

“I’m in a hurry.”

“Go find another servant,” Minho says when he takes one look at Hyunjin dangling his bracelet. “For example, Seungmin’s locked in the pantry.”

Hyunjin doesn’t seem to mind. “Why?”

“He knows why.”

Because Hyunjin has a vendetta against Minho’s equilibrium, he keeps asking without asking, with his eyes. Minho observes his hair tie. It’s all a grateful little miracle Hyunjin still has something to tie up in this stage of fry; his skull shape really is no good for being bald in the future. 

“You like it?” Hyunjin asks. “I couldn’t decide today. Should I just let it be, have the sides like this?”

His wrist picks up shadow. Minho watches the puppet strings in the back of his hand pluck over the slightest fidget.

“I like it.”

There and gone, Hyunjin looks at him from the corner of his eye. Minho looks back. He doesn’t get why the show got awkward suddenly, the air viscous, but Hyunjin’s questionable inner workings aren’t for him to solve. 

Begrudgingly he strings the bracelet around Hyunjin’s wrist and gets to business. The reach does nothing for the angry ache at his shoulder, but he marries the clasp through the eyelet.

“Look closely. Not many people boast this sort of skill.”

Hyunjin’s eyes crescent despite himself.

**

“Hey, boyfriend,” he greets Hyunjin one day, and here’s what happens in order of importance: 

Hyunjin stops chewing his gum.

Han pauses as if he’s smelled something. A mission. He discreetly sweeps the room for cameras and crew.

“I think something just came back up to my mouth,” Changbin worries.

Minho floats over to where Hyunjin spasms out of his trajectory as if about to be tickled (and maybe so), but there’s nowhere to hide but the lovely prison of Changbin’s body. Extending quite a prim index finger, Minho boops Hyunjin’s nose ever so gently.

There.

“Bye, boyfriend,” Minho blows a crooked kiss at Hyunjin’s wonderfully sharp eyes on his way out.

**

Chan’s birthday is slinking around the corner (or so Felix said), and Minho wants to conspire.

His thumb catches on Hyunjin’s bracelet when Hyunjin’s about to round to the sofa with a bowlful of pear, as you do.

“Talk time,” Minho says.

Hyunjin pretends he’s deaf and simply stands there. Minho pulls him by the wrist until Hyunjin startles. 

Minho doesn’t think he’s overstepping anything. Probably not, but Hyunjin’s dry sniff and headshake to knock the fake glasses higher up on his nose make him reconsider.

“Yes, thanks, I’d love some,” Minho’s hand gropes into the bowl of pear. He then chews very juicily while maintaining eye contact.

When Hyunjin reaches the pleasant point of about ninety-eight degrees of misophonia, Minho starts ratting out what Seungmin has in store so they can do it first. 

“Can’t you see I’m busy,” Hyunjin says. “You have to make an appointment.”

“To talk to you?” Hyunjin nods. Minho pulls at his headband until it snaps. To the soundtrack of Hyunjin’s falsetto wails, Minho leans in: “Yes, hello, this is Lee Know. I’d like to book a medium-rare Hwang Hyunjin. Is medium rare when he stops talking nonsense?”

**

The kitchen shrinks after hours. Its reverse epicenter is where people come to appear and the pull gets much worse when everything is quiet. 

Minho hates to be grouped with the victims, but it’s too easy to have the bright idea to stop by.

This is time to be on his own, and the longer he thromboses peeling out ice cubes into the dishcloth, the higher the risk of snagging eyes with someone. He deftly avoids Chan’s half-blind midnight piss stop by turning his back before it’s too late, only to land straight in Hyunjin’s crosshairs when he closes the freezer.

They play look-away chicken until it gets old. Hyunjin looks off, like he wants to talk, and here it’s still enough to, if not intimate. Minho’s nose starts to itch. He feels like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be, an internal organ or Changbin thinking he’s practicing pick-up lines in private. 

As the older one, he should ask. Whatever is it that Hyunjin wants.

The toilet gargles. It coughs up Chan, who zombie-walks past them despite the Mayday Minho is broadcasting to him. He’ll remember this later.

He doesn’t ask. Just waves Hyunjin an awkward goodbye with the ice bomb and a drumming in his ears. 

**

“Thinking about who my new roommate should be,” Hyunjin informs and he’s so philosophical about it Minho thinks about not reacting.

The bed ripples under his tensed forearms. Hyunjin once said lying like this, like Minho is now, makes him look rrragh, so tense, like he’s climbing a frozen block of mountain with those stabby things.

“Oh, you’re thinking?”

Hyunjin hums. Minho pries the pencil from him and leans into the textbook’s flattened spine.

“Think in your own bed then.”

“Hyung’s gone through so much,” Hyunjin says, flat, snatching the pencil back.

Minho hums.

“You think Jisung’ll wanna switch?”

“You don’t want Han.”

“Felix.”

“You’re gonna break Seungmin’s heart.”

“Who said anything about him.”

“Don’t I have a say?”

Hyunjin pretends to think with his oversized head. “No.”

The dog-eared collar of his tank speaks of no sleep or something nastier to bring into bed. Say, old practice dirt. His collarbone protrudes like a stashed knife.

In the thrown light, Hyunjin’s cheeks look like moist bread. Minho laughs at this, ducking headfirst into Hyunjin’s elbow. 

“What?”

“What’s it to you?” Minho soothes into its crook and thinks about biting it. He misses his cats.

Stuck, he smells the weirdness of his own breath on Hyunjin’s skin. It is weird—the way he, for the dear life of him, can’t think of anything bad enough to wrinkle the blanket calm that weighs him down.

He’s tired to the gross point from which he can’t leer, so he just peeks out.

“You work out today?” Hyunjin asks, so low it almost misses the register. 

His eyes are skipping like stones over Minho’s upturned face: nose, chin, mouth. Minho preens, but only to himself. Only on the inside, well under the surface.

“Someone did,” he kneads at Hyunjin’s tricep. He knows full well all Hyunjin did today was stew in his moody pit. “Oh my, our Hyunjin. Master of bulging.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I disagree.” 

Too late to stir, his kneading hand gets confiscated at the wrist. He feels Hyunjin’s wide palm, watches his long carved fingers. The rings on them flash. He collects more trinkets than Minho’s late neurotic aunt. 

Hyunjin strokes one such trinketed finger to his pulse. It’s not leaping and it won’t be, Minho will make sure. 

Hyunjin moves the wiry way to Minho’s bicep which he cops heartily. Here, Hyunjin is humming to himself. This is a naughty time to be composing. The sweet poke of his lip sticks in Minho’s throat like a physical sensation.

Hyunjin’s knee feels like a rock when Minho fake-kicks it (gasp), and there’s a burning thought or two knocking about in his head.

Hyunjin tells him to clip his toenails, that this shit is painful, and that’s no way to talk. 

Minho stuffs half his fingers into Hyunjin’s mouth.

“Hey, Hyunjin,” he says lovingly. “Don’t get a new roommate.”

**

Maybe he should’ve stayed on the couch with Changbin, who had a finger so far up his nose his laugh-y nerve endings started acting up. He was reaching for one of the scale-like pieces of skin he can never pick out of the lining of his nose. Minho gets those when the season turns blue and his breathing dry. 

Now he gets this.

“Did someone die?” he nods to Hyunjin’s screen, where the credits are still rolling.

“Not physically, no.”

Hyunjin makes a trumpet sound into his tissue, and it flaps like a flag in the wind. Witnessing his gooey nose and puffed-up eyes, Minho tries to think of a way to make him feel better about himself.

“Your body’s not bad,” he decides.

Hyunjin does what looks like squinting for an intense moment in time, but really, he’s just looking at him.

“And?”

“That’s it.”

Hyunjin starts ignoring him.

It lasts a full half-hour, by which time Hyunjin is breaking his own rules and relaxing into the weight of Minho’s arm until he’s as close to cuddled as either of them will allow. All the while, Hyunjin has the fake-oblivious look of going about his day.

Try to go about this.

“Face,” Minho keeps the anglicism as he continues, “dance,” adds a half-smile, “brains. Hwang Hyunjin has it all.” 

Check: Hyunjin’s eyes forget to roll.

Mate: Hyunjin is now in this situation, albeit somewhat cynically. 

With Hyunjin at the mercy of interpersonal space, Minho thinks now is a good time to start making kissy faces. It goes well until Hyunjin gets his bearings and tentatively reaches for Minho’s ear. 

Minho doesn’t blink. It’s just a touch. The back of his neck tickles under Hyunjin’s hand when it combs out of his hair like he’s feeling out the path of goosebumps he’s set off, and it’s so small but so big that Minho wants to shred him to confetti.

Hyunjin’s eyeballs look like the veiny pulp slice-through of a blood orange. This is why you should keep crying to a maximum of twice a year.

Hyunjin asks about his shoulder. Minho looks at him funny. 

“You’ve been icing it at weird hours,” Hyunjin says.

Changbin washes up in the interim of Minho’s next blank thought and wedges into their room like a finger between—

“SOS, SOS, I need a charger. This is a matter of life and death.” 

Minho thinks Changbin is lacking in the death department. It appears to him.

Hyunjin navigates him to his overcrowded bedside table, coaching him through not demolishing its cityscape. 

“Or,” Minho offers, “I can just plug your fingers in the socket instead.”

**

“Did you sleep well?”

Minho ignores the sudden invasion of privacy.

“How were your dreams?” Hyunjin pesters again. 

Minho can’t remember. “Unorthodox,” he says. 

“Mmm,” Hyunjin agrees. 

Minho’s thumb stills on the keyboard, turning the half-baked text to Jisung into  _ don’t ask meeeeeeeeeeeeeee. _ He backspaces it to normal E by E. Sets down his phone.

Hyunjin agrees with what?

It’s the right kind of disillusioning to watch the white line of milk spider between Hyunjin’s chews of cereal. So that’s fine. But by all laws of nature, this isn’t right.

Minho puts on a pleasant face. “Someone’s feeling good.”

Licking into the gum line under his lip, Hyunjin shoots his eyebrows up. Higher. To the stars. He’s as close to laughing at Minho as he can without physically doing so. Minho waits for him to toe over the line.

A landslide clacks in the bathroom, all things plastic and regret.

“That’s mine,” Seungmin warns.

“Don’t touch me—” Jeongin.

“Be nice,” Minho scowls.

“Can I get a clean fork around here?” Chan asks from behind, rattling the drawer. “I’m begging.”

**

Hyunjin is listening to one song on loop like a cranky teenager. Changbin’s been circling him like a traffic cone all day long, motioning behind his back to Felix and Jeongin this way is a no-go on the shocking occasion they wanted to move places of their own free will.

When he tries to do the same service for Minho, he sidesteps Changbin and jostles over the armrest.

“Naengmyeon, anyone?” Minho asks cheerfully.

Changbin says he’ll go ask Chan. He does, and the rest Minho sees of him happens in low-res through KaKaoTalk.

In a round of the jittery knee, Hyunjin’s leg rocks the table.  _ Tu-tu-tu-tu. _ Little glass earthquake. Minho slides Hyunjin’s foot away with his foot. Hyunjin kicks Minho’s foot off with his foot.

This lack of foresight means Hyunjin’s center of gravity gets pinched down when Minho straddles him. Hyunjin’s mumble-jumble pant of mockery sprays into his face. Minho shoves at his chin, cautioning against any more spit transfers.

Hyunjin has the body length on him, but not the brainpower to realize. With enough beginner’s luck, he could seize the momentum, but he won’t. First he’d have to possess the deep-running well that is knowledge of combat, and that is no simple task.

“And now what?” Minho goads.

It looks like Hyunjin’s forgotten how to apologize. At this point in his life, that’s not very developed of him.

Minho gets meaner about it until Hyunjin’s arms shake from resisting.

Pow pow pow, he smacks Hyunjin’s face with his own mountain hands. 

Face red, Hyunjin realizes it’s better to conserve his juice and stops the struggle of it all. He’s breathing slow and loud through his nose. This fish lens perspective blows it huge, rounds his head into a cute egg. Minho hopes he never has the little pepper dots from the sun, all over his face, lasered off.

He wants to know what’s wrong.

“You think I’m stupid?” Minho asks. “Stupidest hyung?”

Something so strained ghosts over Hyunjin’s face Minho thinks he’s gonna cry. Any second now.

Instead, Hyunjin kisses him square on the mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> [x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49M1O2YgDfE)


End file.
